Guido Costa Projects is pleased to invite you to Love - trilogia dell'amore, by Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, in the gallery in via Mazzini 24, Torino.

Reflection on the courses and paces of love, the visionary content of sentiments and the subtle energy that they unchain proliferate, Love recounts exemplary stories, “self-portraits” that swing between desire and satisfying desire. It explores its composite macroscopic particles that are distilled into microscopic narrative fragments, each imbibed with a powerful symbolic force. Love soars above fantastic worlds, plunges into primigenial abysses and explodes into the chaos of creation, only to re-materialise into obsessive and drawn out acts of daily life that shuffle between neurosis and fulfilment. The trilogy analyses love in three of its infinite guises: union, loss and joyous repetition. The wonderful camerawork here has turned each into a rapturous story, a gigantic, mad but extremely humane expressionist fresco.

A Star Love (an anagram of Salvatore, the protagonist) is a still from a happy relationship, a fulfilling and reciprocated love story. It verges on a synthesis between distant galaxies where an anxious search becomes a long, voracious and earthly kiss and a token sign of the search for the other, the perilous, life-draining one; it is like an astral journey through one’s own past. Already exhibited in Trento on the occasion of Manifesta, the piece has a dual rhythm counterpoised on two large screens, generating a sort of dialogue between the immeasurably gigantic and the absolutely tiny, between universe and detail.

The same happens in A Dark Love in which Rosario conjectures on the impossibility of love, dressing up his experience, destined to fail, into a sort of epic navigation through the guts of a ghostly place locked between imaginary geological eras. It is an love without synthesis; there are no kisses to seal the love, only missing acts. It is like overcoming repulsion towards water by drinking a full glass of it in one go, as in apnoea a subtle violence that spreads out towards infinity without offering any redemption at all.

Animalove is the third and concluding part of Love. It probes deep inside the first two parts and summarises them in a “double-headed” narration as it drifts between dream state and wakefulness, invention and memory, performance and life.

Animalove is love’s destiny. It unites two complementary extreme sides of love: the spiritual love of the soul and the animal love of nature and living things.

In these extreme gestures of love, the two protagonists reveal the genesis of their own stories in a physical way, where the surprisingly relentless duration of the sequences transforms them both into what we could call a theatrical production of a mnemonic performance, or a reinvented performing memory.

Gianpiero’s story is sad, visionary and poetic. It feeds on the protagonist’s favourite imagery: cartoons and easy listening music. His gesture holds the contradiction contained in all love’s gestures. The artificial tears are collyrium drops that seem to aggravate rather than offer relief to his tired eyes. The way Gianpiero lets them drop one by one into his half-open eye seems to accentuate the pain. The close succession of tears coalesces into “waves”. They reveal the artifice of the moment, but at the same time they inspire real emotion.

Rocco on the other hand is a lover of nature. “Interrupted” by the trauma of an accident, his life has been saved by a dog, thanks to which he has regained a social standing. Rocco kisses this dog incessantly. This gesture of affection, which many people carry out with their own dog, becomes an extreme attempt to impose oneself as a human being, and one who is the worthy and legitimate guardian of a pure sentiment. Kissing the dog is an act of tenderness, but the macro picture, the viewpoint and the duration of the shot twist it into an act of devouring and adoration. The dog becomes wolf, and the man a fearless animal tamer. Rocco’s story is an incredible account of an inner, but also physical, journey through a spectral, empty city of ghosts, a city of ruins that have been overrun by nature. The three “pieces” of the trilogy are an intimate representation of this journey.
Based on their own existence, these verbal accounts are brought to the present day in the form of fantastic transfigurations of recollections. They spin an amazing story that turns from hell into “heavenly” urban landscapes; from hostile “forests” full of danger and animals that are “half alive” and “half dead” into an Earthly paradise. Here, time is suspended, nature is “pure” and the animals are “fantastic”.

Ultimately, nature gets the whiphand in the form of the animal: the dog jumps ranks to become a speechless human, a mute lover and witness, epithet and symbol and guardian of love - the beast becomes the player and co-author of the sentiment.

A musical sequence is grafted onto this the double (self) portrait of Animalove. This musical weave threads together the voices of the protagonists and music from the Sixth Book of Madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa. The lyrics of the Madrigals are examples of great poetic and counterpoint invention containing contrasting feelings and musical chiaroscuro. These songs of profane love match the picaresque and suffering journeys made by Rocco and Gianpiero, and also those of Salvatore and Rosario, the players in A Dark Love and A Star Love.

Adding this final musical element to the dual portrait of the two protagonists creates a single slow sequence. In it Animalove seeks to offer a reflection on the different stages of love as a form of creation and as a profoundly human act.